Curse

song airen · Jun 27, 2006, 01:01 AM // 01:01

Hi, I just became interested in pets a couple of days ago and scoured the 'net reading about them. There are a lot of exhaustive pet guides out there so kudos to those who produced 'em

In my experimentation, however, I thought up a nice, simple little technique of levelling a pet to Dire from lvl5-20 faster than any of the guides and suggestions I could find. The shared online knowledge all points to Dire evolution requiring a high damage output from the pet and, of course, to do this your pet must stay alive. This is the tricky part of pet evolution. If you want a Hearty then just go farming and take the pet with you; if it dies it doesnt matter.

So, for levelling we want the highest level monsters we can solo. And for Dire we want our pet alive and kicking throughout.

So this is what I did:

Location: Elona Reach (lvl20 Minotaurs and lvl22 Dune Burrowers)
Equipment: Doesn't really matter. I tool a Vokur's staff though (+15 energy +7 armour against physical)
Attributes: High Beastmastery, High Expertise, Med-High WS (I cant remember my points distribution and being exact doesnt really matter).

Skill sets:

1. Charm animal (of course)
2. Escape (elite)
3. Throw Dirt (or Lightning Reflexes)
4. Whirling Defense
5. Brutal Strike
6. Feral Lunge
7. Poisonous Bite
8. Trolls Unguent.

Now go to Elona and do that little farm all those mo/Ws seem to love so much (the first pack of minotaurs).

a) Take the Vision Crystal and KEEP IT. As long as you hold it then 95% of the time your foe will ONLY attack YOU. (you can drop it after the inital aggro damages if u like)
b) Aggro 1-4 minotaurs (any more is a little unsafe)
c) Activate Escape, then one of your 2ndary stances, then Escape and so on.
d) Keep Troll Unguent going regularly (tho 100% Trolls is not required)
e) Attack with Feral Lunge and then Poisonous Bite (gives them -7 degen)
f) Use Brutal Strike when below 50%, or when you have plenty of energy. Otherwise just use Feral Lunge to keep adding damage.
g) Watch them die. That's it. It's a relatively fast kill, totatlly safe and heaps of XP.

As you get more confident you can start killing the Dune Burrowers (lvl22) too. These are a bit nastier because of Precision Shot (cant evade it) so you'll need to keep Troll's Unguent going more consistently. Attacking these is where I would really recommend taking Throw Dirt instead.

And that's it. You should have a Dire lvl 20 in no time. The secret, of course, is in aggroing with the Vision Crystal so don't forget it!

David Lionmaster · Jul 03, 2006, 09:51 PM // 21:51

the item holding trick was fixed when factions came out.

Also, the fastest way to get a dire pet is to have it kill you repeatedly before you capture it, eventually it will become lvl 15 and since you didn't damage it and it kept damaging you, it will become dire. At that point you capure the pet.

Just find an animal, start charm animal, cancel it, and have the pet chase you to a rez shrine. Have it kill you, and you will rez again, etc... Go afk for a while and you're good.

Azmodan · Jul 03, 2006, 09:55 PM // 21:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Lionmaster

the item holding trick was fixed when factions came out.

Also, the fastest way to get a dire pet is to have it kill you repeatedly before you capture it, eventually it will become lvl 15 and since you didn't damage it and it kept damaging you, it will become dire. At that point you capure the pet.

Just find an animal, start charm animal, cancel it, and have the pet chase you to a rez shrine. Have it kill you, and you will rez again, etc... Go afk for a while and you're good.

That doesn't work so well if you are trying to charm a phoenix.

SnipiousMax · Jul 03, 2006, 10:23 PM // 22:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Lionmaster

Also, the fastest way to get a dire pet is to have it kill you repeatedly before you capture it, eventually it will become lvl 15 and since you didn't damage it and it kept damaging you, it will become dire. At that point you capure the pet.

Just find an animal, start charm animal, cancel it, and have the pet chase you to a rez shrine. Have it kill you, and you will rez again, etc... Go afk for a while and you're good.

That does not work anymore. The exploit was fixed in an update a week or two back.

Azmodan · Jul 05, 2006, 04:34 PM // 16:34

I used this method with a couple of changes to the skill set and it worked great. I raised my pet from level 8 to level 19 Dire in about 3 hours.

SnipiousMax · Jul 05, 2006, 05:43 PM // 17:43

^Rather than use Escape as your elite, why not try Oath Shot with whirling defense and throw dirt. That'd let you have a constant evasion stance and constant blind.

Ventius Hozza · Jul 05, 2006, 05:49 PM // 17:49

Escape is cr*p. I used elona to farm my pet dire ages ago. Took heal as one. Much more useful elite for this job tbh

Amy Awien · Jul 11, 2006, 07:54 PM // 19:54

I've tried Oath Shotting but the Elona Mino's may block those. Frankly, I've been there and I am a little sceptical about that build and using Elona to train a young pet, let alone doing it with 4 Mino's at a time. Then again, I had neither Heal As One nor Poisonous Bite at that time.
Anyway, I wouldn't really recommend Elona until your pet is at least lvl 12, the Ice Tooth Cave mino's work fast enough, possbily faster as they die much faster, until then.

Amy Awien · Jul 11, 2006, 07:54 PM // 19:54

Duplicate post. sorry

Jenosavel · Jul 12, 2006, 11:57 AM // 11:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

Anyway, I wouldn't really recommend Elona until your pet is at least lvl 12, the Ice Tooth Cave mino's work fast enough, possbily faster as they die much faster, until then.

Amen, especially to that last bit. I prefer to kill hordes of little guys quickly than to kill a few big guys more slowly. If the pet were to gain experience like a player (and it doesn't*, but this will illustrate my point), then at level 5, killing 1.8 level 10 guys would be the same as killing 1 level 20 guy. I'm sure you can imagine which will go faster. By the time you reached level 11, it would take 4 level 10 guys to equal the experience of one level 20 guy. However, by that point you've already out-leveled your opponent and they'll go down that much faster. Of course there comes a point where it's not worth it anymore, but most people don't realize just how worth it it can be.

The point is that lower level enemies die much faster and are more controllable than their higher level counterpart, and people underestimate how much experience their pet will get from mid-level enemies when first starting out. Starting a brand new pet out on end-game foes doesn't really have much benefit.

* the investigation into how much experience pets get and/or how much they need to level was never whittled down to the precision we have with player experience. However, general observations showed that pets continue to gain experience from low level foes after a player would get 0 from them. This would seem to indicate that either 1) pets' experience has a gentler slope, losing less experience per level over their foe than a player would (which would work in both directions and give them even less benefit for a vastly higher level foe) or 2) pets just gain more experience per foe, so the degredation of experience over levels takes longer to bring that total to 0.